Take it from Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn: “Your focus determines your reality.” Amid a relentless stream of emails, meetings, and stimuli, scheduling periods of alone time to focus on the important stuff is key, says Harvard Business Review.

In 2010, Eric Schmidt, then the CEO of Google, said: “Every two days, we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization until 2003.”

We need to start treating innovation like other business disciplines — as a set of tools that are designed to accomplish specific objectives. Just as we wouldn’t rely on a single marketing tactic or a single source of financing for the entire life of an organization, we need to build up a portfolio of innovation strategies designed for specific tasks.

Ask yourself: How well can we define the problem? And how well can we define the skill domain(s) needed to solve it?